Three People You Need in Your Life

As this lands in your inbox, many fellow speakers and thought leaders are touching down in Austin, Texas for National Speakers Association's annual conference, INFLUENCE.

Several years ago, in the very same ballroom, I was attending another event, surrounded by a group of fellow speakers, consultants, podcasters, and writers, all competing for a slice of the same exact pie in the same exact niche industry. And yet, one of the big takeaways from that event was that it was important to surround yourself with community. The room was full of individuals who were driven, outspoken, and most importantly, passionate about lifting each other up to make their profession better, together. It was a room full of competitors who had decided to grow the pie together instead of fighting over the slices.

There is something important for us all to remember. It is one thing I have learned for certain, across venture-backed startups, Main Street entrepreneurship, and a couple of decades as a speaker and thought leader: community is essential to life. Not nice to have. Not a maybe someday goal. Essential.

The Work is Lonelier Than It Looks

Those of us who are solopreneurs spend a shocking amount of our lives alone. Alone in the car to the airport. Alone in the hotel room. Alone in a ballroom full of strangers we're about to meet for the very first time. From the outside it looks like a stage and a spotlight, and from the inside a whole lot of it is a quiet room and a rolling suitcase.

Some of us get lucky and end up on the circuit with people we genuinely love. I have lifelong friends who came out of what I can only call my “road family,” and my kids have even have real relationships with some of these people. That didn't happen because I'm good at networking, believe me. In fact, I’m quite bad at networking… It happened because I kept showing up, and like I shared last week, I would invest in community and they would give back and invest in me.

There's real research under this, too. Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis, writes about how people rooted in community stay consistently happier even when their circumstances are genuinely hard, and he shares the story of a woman whose life looked difficult by every conventional metric and who was still one of the happiest people in the study. Her secret wasn't a wellness routine or a full bank account. She showed up every week with a small group of people who knew her and whom she knew. That was it.

I think about that every time I talk to someone who's grinding in isolation. Technically excellent, working hard, running the whole thing alone, and yet something about it feels hollow, or unsustainable, or honestly both.

The Three People You Need in Your Life, Yesterday

What I’ve learned first in business, then in life, then in speaking, is that you need three types of people in your life. The reality is most of us are missing at least one of them, if not more.

The first is the forerunner, someone who has already gone where you're trying to go. A true mentor. Someone who can tell you what the road ahead actually looks like because they’ve walked it and who saves you the cost of tripping in the potholes and stepping on landmines you'd otherwise have to make the hard and expensive way.

The second is the running mate, someone running right alongside you. This may be the most important. Not ahead of you and not behind you, but shoulder to shoulder, keeping the same pace because they're running it too. This is the person who picks you up when you go down and pushes you when you want to slow up, and they know exactly what your pace feels like because they're in it with you. You have eachother’s backs.

The third is the mentee, someone a few steps behind you who's watching how you navigate the stretch of road they're about to walk. And here's what almost everybody misses about that third relationship. I hinted at it last week. Having a mentee isn't primarily about what you give them. When you share what you've been through with someone coming up behind you, something strange and wonderful happens, and you end up internalizing your own experience. The information turns into insight. The stories you tell become lessons you actually hold onto, the hard seasons finally make sense in the retelling, and you hear yourself explain what you learned and you learn it all over again, deeper this time. The mentee thinks you're doing them the favor, but the truth is it runs both ways.

I don't say any of this theoretically; this has been crucial to my personal growth and development. And I have people in each of these seats both professionally and personally.

For me, that community has looked like NSA and SCN more than anywhere else. In NSA's Million Dollar Speakers Group I've found my running mates, the peers who know exactly what's happening in my business and will tell me the truth about it. Across both groups I've found mentors a few steps ahead of me who've shown me the road, and I've found newer voices coming up behind me that I get to pour into. That's the beauty of a good group, whether it's one of those two or one of the many others I've been part of over the years.

Why Most of Us Only Have One

If you look honestly at your own circle, my guess is you're heavily weighted in one direction.

A lot of us have people in the “mentor” seat we deeply respect but never actually talk to. We follow them online, we read their stuff, we feel influenced from a comfortable distance, and we call that a mentor relationship when really it's just admiration. Admiration is free, and it's one-directional, and it will never once call you back.

Fewer of us have real co-runners, the people who know what's genuinely happening inside our business, who we call when something goes sideways, who tell us the truth when we're about to make a bad call. It feels like in culture today, so many of us are allergic to accountability. We are afraid of healthy vulnerability. Our world can be competitive enough that real peer relationships start to feel risky, and we catch ourselves wondering what happens if we let someone see too much. So we keep it all polished, and polished is lonely.

And the mentee is the relationship most of us delay the longest. "I'm not successful enough yet." "I don't have enough figured out to teach anybody anything." That isn't humility, that's leaving a relationship on the table that would accelerate everything else in your life. I even think of my own kids. When my son was in kindergarten, he had a Kinderbuddy—a fourth grader. They would read together, draw pictures together, and it gave my son someone to look up to, and it gave his kinderbuddy the opportunity to internalize the information he had learned by teaching it to another.

A common misconception with becoming a mentor is that you must have reached some level of “success.” But that’s simply untrue. You don't need it all figured out to have a mentee. You just need to be a few honest steps ahead of somebody who'd benefit from knowing what those steps looked like.

How to Actually Find Community

One of the best ways to find these individuals is in community. I’m a member of the Million Dollar Speakers Group, National Speakers Association, and Speaking Consulting Network. I find all three types of people in each of these organizations, which keeps me coming back.

The forerunner you probably already know of. The real question is whether you've ever asked them for an actual relationship, or whether you've just been quietly consuming their content and hoping it counts. Often we are afraid to ask or afraid of rejection if that person we admire says no. And a quick aside: a mentor is not paid. There is nothing wrong with paying someone a few steps ahead of you, but that’s not a mentor; that’s a coach.

The co-runner takes honesty. You have to be willing to let another person in on what's really going on, the gig that fell apart, the quarter that came up short, the decision you're genuinely not sure about. If every one of your professional relationships is polished and buttoned-up, you don't have co-runners. You have an audience.

And the mentee is closer than you think. If you've been doing your thing for even a year or two, there is likely someone in a group you already belong to who would be better off for thirty minutes of your time. You know more than you think you know, so go give the conversation away.

That abundant room in Austin, the one full of competitors who chose to grow together, wasn't built on some clever strategy. It was built on the same simple thing all three of these relationships are built on, people deciding that what they'd been given was worth passing along to the folks who needed it next. That's not networking. That's community. And community, it turns out, isn't a nice-to-have for when business is good. It's essential, to the work and honestly to the life.

So to everyone gathering in Austin this week, I hope you find that abundant room. And to everyone who isn't, whether you're part of a national association, a local chapter, a mastermind, or no group at all yet, you don't need a plane ticket or a membership to build this. You just need three people.

Until next time,

P.S. Who is your co-runner right now? Not someone you admire from across the internet, but someone who actually knows what's happening in your business this month. Hit reply and tell me. I'm genuinely curious whether most people can name one in a heartbeat or have to sit and think about it.